Rachel Cole

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Rachel Cole could sew a seam that a magistrate would have sworn was woven, and she used the same exactness on the secrets of her family. She was born in 1745 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the daughter of a carpenter and a herbalist, and she died in the winter of 1819 of a cough she had carried through most of the season, aged seventy-four. By trade she was a seamstress. By birth she belonged to the House of Faulkner, the Lancastrian line that kept the Red Ledger, though she was not called and never hunted. Her life was spent in the working middle of the family, where the needle, the kettle and the shared table served the hunters as much as any silver ball. Marblehead in the 1740s was one of the busiest fishing ports in the colonies, a crooked, rocky town crammed onto a peninsula north of Boston, where houses stood shoulder to shoulder on lanes so narrow that two carts could not pass. The harbour was crowded with schooners and shallops heading out to the Grand Banks for cod, and the whole town smelled of fish flakes, tar and salt. The men were away for months at a stretch, and a great many of them never came back, lost on the shoals or in winter gales, so that the town was full of widows and seemed at times to be run by women. It was a place where practical skills were prized, where neighbours knew each other's affairs, and where a girl who could sew and manage money would never want for work. Rachel's father, Obadiah Faulkner Cole, was born in 1723 and made his living as a carpenter, building and repairing the wharves, fish stages and small houses of the town. Her mother, Lucy Osgood, born in 1725, was a herbalist who dried and distilled plants in the back kitchen and was called to the beds of the sick. The household knew what it was. The name Faulkner in her father's name was no accident, for the Coles had long been a cadet limb of the Lancastrian line, and the family's history reached back through Massachusetts to the Wars of the Roses. Neither of Rachel's parents was a slayer, but their house was a place the hunters used. A Faulkner slayer coming into Marblehead by boat or on foot would find a bed at the Coles', and Lucy's medicines were used to patch up men who had come off badly from their work. Rachel grew up with strangers in the kitchen and a rule of silence in the street. She learned early that the best way to keep a secret was to be too busy to be interesting. She learned her needle skill in the same way. A Marblehead seamstress was in constant demand, since fishermen's wives sewed shirts and frocks for the fleet, and the town's shops paid for finished garments by the dozen. By fourteen Rachel had a reputation for speed and neatness, and by sixteen she could cut a coat from a piece of broadcloth without waste. She took in piecework and, with two friends, worked a corner of a loft above a chandler's shop, where the three of them sewed by the light of the window and sang. She kept every scrap of leftover cloth, and the quilts and patched garments she made from them became a family tradition. In 1762 she married Hezekiah Osgood, a Newbury militiaman she had met at a husking and who was, as she said, the only man she had ever known who could be trusted to keep still. She was seventeen. The marriage joined the Coles to the Osgoods, a connection already made by her mother's maiden name, and it took her from Marblehead to the quieter town of Newbury. She kept her sewing trade, which followed her wherever she went, and she was the one who told her husband what the family was. She waited until she was sure of him, then chose an evening, and told him plainly. His response, a long silence and a practical question, confirmed her choice. The household they built was a busy, warm and modest one. Rachel Osgood Faulkner was born in 1765 and Lucy Osgood Faulkner in 1768, and the girls, like their mother, carried the Faulkner name forward through the female line. Rachel raised them in a house in which the needle was always at hand and the front door was never locked to a cousin. She taught them to hem, to gather and to stitch a buttonhole, and she taught them, gradually, the older lessons. One evening a week the girls learned the names in the Red Ledger, not to boast of them but to understand what their family did and why it was quiet about it. She never pushed them toward the hunt, and neither of the girls became a slayer. Her brother Ephraim Faulkner Cole, four years younger, had moved to a storekeeper's life, and she stayed close to him. She sewed his shop aprons, made up the linen for his wedding in 1773, and lent him money when the stock ran low. When her mother Lucy died in 1775, in the first year of the Revolution, it was Rachel who took over the medicine chest and the herb garden, though she declined to set up as a herbalist herself. She noticed that her mother's remedies still worked and used them for her own family and for neighbours. The war came to her door as it did to everyone's. Her husband marched with the militia, and she kept the house alone through the years of scarcity, turning old garments into new and selling stitching to the army. She remembered particularly one winter when she made forty shirts for the soldiers at Cambridge and was paid in paper currency worth less than the thread. She lost her father in 1796, and her brother Ephraim in the same hard winter. Her husband Hezekiah had died the year before, in 1795, after a long decline. She was widowed at fifty and lived on for two decades in the house in Newbury, sewing for a modest income and looking after the growing number of grandchildren. She grew a little stooped and a great deal quieter. Visitors recalled a small neat woman with a thimble on her finger and a tin box of buttons on her lap, who seemed to know at once who they were and what they needed. She died in 1819 of a winter cough, at seventy-four, outliving most of her contemporaries. Her daughter Rachel, who died in 1829, and Lucy, who died in 1813, were both buried close by. The family kept her button box for generations. Her story appears in the Red Ledger only as a note that the Cole house at Marblehead sheltered the hunters. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as Rachel Cole, the seamstress of Marblehead, who stitched the family together.